Tuesday, 31 March 2015

“The Lord God made trees spring from the ground, all
trees pleasant to look at and good for food; and in the middle of the
garden he set the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil.” - Genesis 2: 9 (New English Bible, 1970)

"Did
you hear of the spree they had up Bulawayo way, hanging those three
niggers for spies? I wasn't there myself, but a fellow who was told me
they made the niggers jump down from the tree and hang themselves; one
fellow wouldn't bally jump, till they gave him a charge of buckshot in
the back: and then he caught hold of a branch with his hands and they
had to shoot 'em loose. He didn't like hanging. I don't know if it's
true, of course; I wasn't there myself, but a fellow who was told me.
Another fellow who was at Bulawayo, but who wasn't there when they were
hung, said they fired at them just after they jumped, to kill 'em. I—" -
from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner (1897)
“Southern trees bear strange fruit,Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.” - from “Strange Fruit” by Lewis Allan (Abel Meeropol)
“We all live at the base of the Hanging Tree waiting for death?” - from The Hanging Tree
by David Lambkin (Viking, 1995). A comment on the etching “The Hanging
Tree” from the series “The Miseries of War” by Jacques Callot (1592 –
1635)

Tree of Life or Tree of Death?

How did the “Tree of Life” become the “hanging
tree”? There can be no doubt that it has. Many thousands of bodies
have hung from trees, twisting in the breeze, crawling with flies and
maggots, spreading a hideous miasma of death around what should be
“pleasant to look at and good for food.”

One reason has been religious intolerance: “As a
Bohemian noblewoman, Polyxena Lobkovic, perceptively observed from
the vantage point of Prague: 'Things are now swiftly coming to the
pass where either the papists will settle their score with the
Protestants, or the Protestants with the papists.'” (Europe,
history of. (2012). Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia
Britannica Deluxe Edition. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica.)

In the name of the Teacher who in time became
known as the “Prince of Peace” unspeakable horrors were visited
on people who believed differently during the so-called Thirty Years
War (1618 - 1648). These horrors were graphically documented by the
artist Jacques Callot in a series of prints entitled “The Miseries
of War.”

One of these prints called “The Hanging Tree”
eerily prefigures the lynching of mostly black men in the southern
states of the United States (the term comes from Charles Lynch
(1736–96), a Virginia planter and justice of the peace) by mobs who
would hang people accused of some crime, real or imagined, from
trees. These hangings often occurred in a kind of carnival atmosphere
with men, women and children jeering at those being hanged. The
hangings were often accompanied by mutilation of the victims.

Strange Fruit

Racial intolerance and hatred thus is another
reason for the perversion of the tree of life into the tree of death.

In the period between 1882 and 1951 some 4730
people were lynched in the US, 1293 of them white and 3437 black. The
perpetrators were seldom prosecuted although their identities were
often known to law enforcement authorities.

Such lynchings were often justified by the
perpetrators as being in the promotion of purity or morality. As one
leader of the mob hanging Allen Brooks in Dallas TX on 3 March 1910
was heard to say: "You did the work of men today and your deeds
will resound in every state, village, and hamlet where purity and
innocence are cherished and bestiality and lechery condemned."
(http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.html)

Abel Meeropol, a teacher in New York –
coincidently at Dewitt Clinton High School in the Bronx among whose
alumni were James Baldwin, Richard Rodgers, Burt Lancaster, Stan Lee,
Neil Simon, Richard Avedon – saw a 1930 photograph by Lawrence
Beitler of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. The photo
haunted him for days and inspired a poem initially called “Bitter
Fruit” which was first published in the union journal The New
York Teacher in 1937.

Being something of an amateur composer as well as
poet (he also wrote, under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, "The House
I Live In" and "Apples, Peaches and Cherries" among
many others), Meeropol also wrote music for his poem. It was sung as
an anti-racism protest song by his wife Anne and Laura Duncan at
Madison Square Garden.

How “Strange Fruit” became “Lady Day's”
song

"...the first significant protest in
words and music, the first unmuted cry against racism." -
Leonard Feather

"She really was happy only when she
sang. The rest of the time she was a sort of living lyric to the song
`Strange Fruit,' hanging, not on a poplar tree, but on the limbs of
life itself." - jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason

"When you listen to her, it's almost
like an audio tape of her autobiography," - Tony Bennett

In 1939 Billie Holiday was singing at the Café
Society, the first integrated night club in New York. The musical
director of her gig, Robert Gordon, reportedly heard the song sung at
Madison Square Gardens and took it to Holiday, who was nervous about
singing it in a club setting.

Barney Josephson, founder of Café Society, set up
some strict rules for the song's performance. There would be no
service during the song, which would end the gig, and a single
spotlight would be on Holiday's face. During a longish introduction
Holiday would stand in the spotlight in an attitude of prayer.
Josephson also insisted that there would be no encore.

The band at the Café Society, which also backed
Holiday when she recorded the song for Milt Gabler's Commodore label
in 1939, was led by trumpeter Frankie Newton (1906 – 1954) with Tab
Smith (1909 – 1971) on alto sax, Kenneth Hollon and Stanley Payne
on tenors, Sonny White (1917 – 1971) on piano, Jimmy McLinn (1908 –
1983) on guitar, Johnny Williams (1908 - ?) on bass and Eddie
Dougherty (1915 - ?) on drums.

Holiday recorded the song again for Norman Granz's
“Jazz at the Philharmonic” in 1945. On this recording she is
accompanied by Milt Raskin (1916 – 1977) on piano. She introduces
this recording by saying it is a song “written specially for me.”
If that was not literally true, she certainly made the song her own.

Bitter crop or sweet life?

“Jazz is not simply music. Jazz is
about civil rights, human dignity and dialogue among cultures. Jazz
emphasises the importance of creativity and freedom of expression.”
- Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director-General

“The psychological harm inflicted by
the era of terror lynching extends to the millions of white men,
women, and children who instigated, attended, celebrated, and
internalized these horrific spectacles of collective violence.
Participation in collective violence leaves perpetrators with their
own dangerous and persistent damage, including harmful defense
mechanisms such as 'diminish[ed] empathy for victims' that can lead
to intensified violent behaviors that target victims outside the
original group. Lynching was a civic duty of white Southern men that
brought them praise. Southern white children were taught to embrace
traumatic violence and the racist narratives underlying it.” - from
the Equal Justice Initiative report Lynching in America:
Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror (2015)

The ugly reality of lynching contrasts with the
beauty of trees felt by most people who experience the wonderful
presence of life represented by them:

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.”

No doubt Joyce Kilmer's poem “Trees” is full
of overblown sentiment and yet it strikes a chord with many people
because it captures something of the wonder felt by sensitive people
seeing a tree:

“A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the sweet earth's flowing
breast;”

For all its sentimentality and strange
anthropomorphism:

“A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;”

the poem is a celebration of a wonder of creation.
Trees are, in their amazing variety, essential to all life, even life
that plays out where there are no trees.

“Pastoral scene of the gallant
south,The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,Scent of
magnolias, sweet and fresh,Then the sudden smell of burning
flesh.”

From the great arboreal canopies of the equatorial
rain forests to the sparse vegetation of the South African Karoo
trees offer the promise of life, of shelter, of food.

If “only God can make a tree” it still is up
to us humans to ensure that the tree is a tree of life and not of
death by working constantly for tolerance and justice, for the
overcoming of prejudice and the hatred that comes from it. We need
trees to live but not trees that bear that “strange and bitter
crop.”

About Me

I am a 68-year-old retired person who is still an adult educator, life coach and writer. I live in Pretoria, South Africa, with my wife, Catherine, and ten-year-old daughter. My younger daughter's name is Caitlin after the wife of Dylan Thomas. I am an avid reader and also love listening to music of most kinds but in particular jazz and classical.